On the near-forgotten world of Malpurtius, the Angels Resplendent brood in their Fortress Monastery of Kanvolis, guarded – or perhaps guarding – the trackless, chaotic waste of the Reverie. When Varzival Czervantes begins to tug at the strings of corruption and madness that have taken root within the fortress, the web begins to collapse, pulling the chapter and world closer to oblivion.
The Reverie sits within the Dark Coil, unique as the only entry branded as Warhammer Horror – the variably used category for dark Black Library entries that dwell in Gothic menace with ostensibly lower, scarier, stakes than their mainline brothers. Published during the exceedingly dark days of October 2020, the Reverie was probably the first Black Library release in years that I didn’t snap up immediately – in fact, the idea of reading horror at all during lockdown put me right off even trying the book. With a couple of years under my belt, and after reading the Dark Coil: Damnation, I was absolutely psyched to pick up another of Peter Fehervari’s weird and wonderful novels. While I enjoyed most of it, and recommend giving it a read, the Reverie left me a little cold, like two very different novellas fighting for pages. As we delve ever deeper into the Dark Coil here at Goonhammer, I wanted to dig in to why The Reverie works, when it doesn’t work, and how it poses strange, probing questions of what Warhammer fiction can and should be.
Angels and Demons
The first – and best – half of the book is largely about Space Marines. That’s very usual for the Black Library, but it’s unusual for its horror-focused imprint. Warhammer Horror has tended towards ghost stories, the everyday human in whatever setting encountering something beyond the bounds of comprehension. Putting marines in there might be a misstep, but before things go wrong with the intersection of marines and horror, it’s well worth talking about Fehervari’s creativity (already very evident with his treatment of Guard, Chaos and Xenos) with our favourite superhuman warriors.
The Angels Resplendent are very possibly the most interesting take on the Adeptus Astartes we’ve yet seen. For lore-and-logistics nerds there’s enough worldbuilding here about their non-codex organisation, crusading practices and control of their home world to tantalise, and as one of those nerds I can’t help but love a non-codex chapter that isn’t just “these guys are the choppy marines who don’t like orders!” like everyone else. As a Chapter they’re a unique way of exploring the legacy of Sanguinius, taking the one bit of the Heresy Blood Angels – their creativity, obsession and artistic expression – that every other known successor chapter tends to skip over instead of the much more obvious “they drink blood and hit people with swords”. Art as a focus for the inhuman abilities and mindset of the Space Marines is an endlessly productive font of perspectives on character – just what kind of art would an immortal, intelligent weapon, make? Why are they doing it? What drives them, what interests them? A Space Marine with interests beyond technology and how shiny they can polish their swords is, perhaps, one of the weirdest and scariest bits of this horror-branded story. If you know what happens to the Angels Resplendent, there’s a lot of setup here for why it happens, to the extent that you’re wondering if it will happen here (it doesn’t) – if you don’t, then what you get is a very weird Chapter, and that’s absolutely fine.
It’s also a space for nice little nods to the art world, which is very much in the grand tradition of Warhammer jokes and Fehervari’s own propensity to pick up a non-40k story and drown it in the warp. There’s a lot of Umberto Eco in here, and hints and pieces of surrealist artist Luis Bunel in the decaying heart of the Angels Resplendent turned inward – half L’Age D’Or and half The Exterminating Angel (which is an incredibly 40k title for a film). Space Marines have telling, revealing names – Librarian Satori is a yokai spirit wrung eight feet tall; Glass makes minimalist art; Czervantes is off tilting at windmills; Caravaggio is hard shadow and light – the kind of thing that gives you that satisfying nod of the head and a warm, suffused, sense of smugness when you get it. Beyond me being a smug bastard though, the names provide a very dark coil feel – all not very “Imperial,” subtly different, subtly meaningful, subtly wrong.
Horror and Destruction
There’s a twin, looping and curving, horror at the heart of The Reverie that has nothing to do with the chaotic forest that bears the name. Both are born from the nature of Space Marines, one that they are capable of great, superhuman feats of valour and folly, and the other that they are not capable of humanity. Those two themes ride around each other, reinforcing and reverberating through the time-slipping ouroboros at the heart of the story. A Marine has concerns that humans don’t – the preservation, creation and management of the Reverie; the threat of the Black Rage – but due to this they cannot see the human world in front of them. It’s transhuman neglect that creates the spaces corruption festers in, transhuman abilities that give it outlets, and very human death that results. Our “good guys” are strange, uncaring figures more concerned with art and their own intricate plans than the lives of those around them, so when horror starts to creep up through the human population of the book, it ends up where it originated – Space Marines conceived, birthed and raised it. Now they have to deal with it.
That’s there in the heart of the Reverie, a great conceit of the warped geography the Black Library does so well – hells without entrance or exit – and looped time, a single moment of shared trauma bringing Marine aspirants into an endless rerun of Stand By Me. Fehervari plays (a lot!) with what we expect from Space Marines before their transformation and the endless return and replay of what may be the final or inciting incident in the novel (or both) is a machine grinding out fear and tension. The transhuman neglect is there in the cast of mortal characters too, with the muses of the Angels Resplendent being the stand-out bit of weirdness in the novel. Marines with human hangers on, inspirations, sources of creative power, almost groupies, that travel in the thrall of their masters before, inevitably, being discarded into the messy artists’ commune that has metastasised in the heart of the Fortress Monastery. We’ve had the ideas of Transhuman Panic before – that seeing a Marine turns humans into cowering animals – but here you get the numbing that arises from other, non-physical superiorities. The Marines make better art, see further, understand more, and the Muses are merely batteries or cattle – these strange Sons of Sanguinius might not drink blood, but they certainly drain their humans of something vital.
There’s a lot of decadence in there, all faded wigs and pastel-white makeup that’s a straight line to the Bourbons or the campaigns of Savonarola and it serves its purpose to create an unusual kind of underground, a danger that the marines seem incapable of noticing. Pride comes before a fall, and while we don’t get the fall here, it’s always threatening in a way that comes to the fore in many Marine stories – not that they could fail in their duties, but that their transhumanity has led them too far from the people they’re ostensibly protecting. The Muses are drugs and junkies simultaneously, the human (for now) detritus left in the wake of artisan-warriors with bigger, better things to do.
There’s the occasional uncomfortable and baffling shorthand taken to portray that kind of fin-de-siècle world ending decadence. One of them is structural – the Angels Resplendent will, at some point, become the Angels Penitent and commit the bonfire of the vanities – but unless you know that there’s mysteries and forebodings that feel nonsensical. The other is more sinister, and that’s around gender. The muses are a place to explore sexuality and gender among the humans the Angels Resplendent cart around, but that fairly quickly edges into old tropes around “different” and “bad.” Where queer characters exist, they’re involved in Chaos cult activity and murdered shortly after – I would hope it wasn’t deliberate, but either way it’s outright the worst way to talk about how the human moral system falls apart under the transhuman shadow.
All this intricate world building and unique exploration of the relationship between human, marine, chaos, and art, comes to a fairly abrupt end just over half way through the novel. From a genuinely unsettling middle comes a decidedly not horrifying end. I couldn’t work out why – after all, Warhammer is a horrifying setting. It took a fair bit of digging to put my finger on the problem.
Horror Isn’t Warhammer
There’s a lot of advice out there for aspiring Horror writers, and I ended up reading quite a lot of it for this review. Most of it is around setup – create an evocative environment, tease with a hook or “hidden threat”, establish your characters and put them in the path of the threat. That’s all stuff that comes up in military and thriller fiction/sci-fi too – the core structure being a promise of carnage that’s teased and then unleashed. It’s not far off a lot of Space Marine fiction where you’re introduced to the big bad and then see our mighty heroes fighting it off for the rest of the book (and inverted nicely in Twice Dead King where the Imperium are the terrifying existential threat). Other sets of advice were about the protagonists – perhaps reasonable or relatable characters who make terrible (or terrifying) decisions – and, again, that’s common to just about every form of narrative.
What tended to stand apart from how military scifi tends to work was the mystery. Horror works best when there’s a mystery of some kind – who, what, where, why etc. “I know what you did last summer” – who knows? “This hole was made for me” – how do you know? “The Entire Lovecraft Corpus” – why did he find Italians so scary? We as a species find mysteries enthralling and terrifying, the idea that there might be something at the back of the cave, or just beyond the long grass, that we don’t know and can’t see speaks to the remnant shreds of DNA from a shrew-like ancestor. Chaos impinging into order – mystery as the problem within a solved universe. I think mystery is why Warhammer 40k Horror is so hard to get right.
Mystery is occasionally completely absent in 40k Horror. We know infinitely more than our protagonists ever could, so occasionally the horror of the unknown is replaced by the sure knowledge that the warp does exist, that you can buy demons for £40 a box. It’s not just an absence of mystery but a cosy sense of familiarity, even acceptance and joy in antagonist actions that makes a shock reveal that “these people are chaos cultists!” difficult to find terrifying. I’ve talked about this before, but I struggle to find Chaos very scary because raising demons and generally being evil is effectively their job. They’re less offensive and terrifying in their career choices than the (in-universe) police, traders, warriors and explorers. When the ultimate authority for the Imperium is eating the souls of a thousand people a day, a couple of sacrifices here and there by chaos cultists means fuck all. In the end, a cultist is a T3/1W model who might have a 5+ save if you’re lucky. Demons are tough, but most of them can double up for Age of Sigmar. We know them too well. As a result, Chaos can be creepy, and weird, and unsettling, but it’s rarely scary.
In fact – and this is very true in the Reverie – when Chaos is revealed, the tension and fear dies away because the actions of Chaos cultists are very rational in their context. In our world, if someone skins people and nails their screaming, flayed bodies to the door of a cathedral because they believe it will summon demons, it’s terrifying, an aberration and offence against orderly society. When it happens in 40k, it works, and you measure 9 inches from an enemy unit and put the demons on the table. The actions of the mad are rational in a mad universe. Where Warhammer does horror well is in giving us something real and rational with a twist – thinking back to the Ravenor series where the horror of an Akira-style flesh monster is nothing compared to warehouses full of scriveners being struck down by chance accumulations of phonemes.
While Reverie does get to this point with the obsessions of the artist-marines giving us a chaotic twist on a familiar world, once Chaos is unleashed the horror drops away, and this is what pulled me out of the narrative when shit hit the fan. From a deliciously creepy, abandoned dolls house and slow music box winding down style setup, the forces of Chaos are revealed and you realise…. well, yeah. That’s what Chaos does isn’t it? The Nurglish guys are pretty happy and chummy and there’s ongoing sacrifices to some terrible end. But we kind of know the terrible end – it’s Chaos, baby! Can you fault them, is there any mystery in their actions, or fear, or terror, when their gods are very very real? In the end, the choice is they’re either defeated, or another world gets pulled into the Warp. There’s a million more, no worries. Norman’s probably reading it and working out how to model it.
Space Marines Are Horrifying
Compounding the issue of mystery that isn’t that mysterious is the virtual omnipotence of the Space Marines. Reverie does a number of very, very interesting things with Marines; as we’ve discussed, but Marines are probably the ultimate horror killers. They in themselves are terrifying, and the start of the novel milks a lot of tension and fear out of inscrutable transhumans and their attitudes towards (cis?)humans, all to good effect. It’s when the bolters break out that horror tends to evaporate.
Space Marines fighting are scary things, but as soon as they start fighting the days of their enemies are numbered. One of the great horrors of the Reverie, one of many nexuses of terror, is neutered and destroyed by Space Marines over the course of a paragraph. Another is battled to a standstill and blasted by psychic shenanigans. Both sections are great, but they aren’t horror. It’s a bit like you’re watching The Wicker Man, but suddenly Christopher Lee is shot by the SAS – jarring, and possibly a nonsensical end to a great movie, but not horrifying. It’s hard to be scared, or unsettled, by Marines fighting Marinely. There’s some fantastic marine fighting stuff out there that is terrifying – the fall of Malvolion short story is a great example – but we know too much about Marines to find horror in their perspectives. As readers we are occasionally assaulted with the sheer quaking terror a baseline human faces when they see a Marine – the Minka Lesk books are great for this – but once we’re firmly behind the familiar helmets and lenses the world can be inexplicable or puzzling, but never scary. It’s a comfort to be armed in ceramite and adamantium, even in the absence of plot armour.
Thinking about this, I (w)racked my brain to think of moments in 40/30k novels where you feel fear while in the Marine viewpoint, and there are very few that I can recall. The first time you meet Samus in the Heresy is one; perhaps elements of the Siege of Terra, whenever the dripping claustrophobic nightmare of Space Hulk/Genestealers comes up. In all cases, once the bolters get unslung and the swords come out, we are too familiar, far too familiar, to feel even a thrill of fear. We ourselves have been transmuted by a transhuman ideology – they know no fear, so we can’t either.
So what then for the Reverie, and Warhammer Horror in general? Fehervari knows horror well, which makes this a weird read – half setup for a deliciously creepy novel, half fairly standard bolter fare – and I wonder what it was that designated this one “horror” when other books in the Dark Coil are mainline 40k fiction. To me the Reverie feels like an experiment cut short, the first half playing with the boundaries of what Marines can be, the environments they can live in and their purpose when there isn’t Only War. It’s a horror without the horrifying, a Rebecca-style gothic novel where suspense, set dressing and dialogue create the feeling of looming, vital, doom without the need for a monster lurking under the stairs (okay, I’ll give you Mrs Danvers, fair point). I don’t know if you can get away with that in the Black Library though, despite the fact that carrying that feel all the way through to an obscure, pathos-laden end would have made for a more interesting, more challenging, read.
While as-is I’d definitely recommend The Reverie if you want to carry on down the spirals of the Dark Coil, there’s hints here of another book I’d recommend much more. Perhaps somewhere out there there’s a draft where nary a bolter is shot and the clockwork continues to spin an orrery of artist-marines in ever more perilous orbits, destabilised and destabilising until the Reverie reaches out to crush them all. In the end, though, these are still books about models, so until we get a range of dancing, sculpting, painting, singing intercessors, that opportunity is likely lost, if it ever existed at all.
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